The gentrification of Hamilton

What ‘we see in Hamilton is not wholly, or perhaps even primarily, homegrown’

A few weeks ago, 30 people smashed windows along Locke Street. An anonymous blog, apparently written by one of them, explained their actions. The target, it seems, was ‘gentrification,’ a word used several times.

It wasn’t the first act of vandalism against gentrification in Hamilton — there had been others on Barton. And there have been many other, less violent, expressions of concern. Are those concerns justified?

Certainly, Locke Street and some adjacent blocks have been changing lately, becoming less affordable. The same is true of a few other places in the Lower City. I will talk about this in my next article. But first we need to think about two other things that have helped to make gentrification an issue.

Back in the 1970s, when I was writing a Master’s thesis about gentrification, no one thought this was a reason to throw stones. No-one smashed windows in Cabbagetown, one of the first areas to gentrify in Toronto, or in those other neighbourhoods that upgraded in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a different time. How?

People weren’t talking about income inequality and the one per cent. This topic has surfaced as a fact and a public issue at the same time that anti-gentrification militancy has begun to appear — in Brooklyn, NYC, Denver, and now Hamilton. Wrapped up with the blogger’s references to ‘gentrification’ was condemnation of ‘the rich:’ the landlords who raise rents, the yuppie businesses that sell high-end baked goods, the folks who drive Audis.

Now Hamilton is hardly a haven for the one per cent. But it has seen growing income inequality. The standard measure is the Gini coefficient, which varies from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (complete inequality). The Gini for Hamilton rose from 0.34 in 1980 to 0.39 in 2000. Other Canadian cities have seen the same trend, but the rate of increase in Hamilton has been greater than most.

And Hamilton has been affected by other big trends. Obvious ones are the loss of fairly secure, well-paid manufacturing jobs; the growth of precarious, part-time employment; and a virtual standstill in the production of new rental housing. The existence of poverty in Hamilton is not news. It has been talked about many times, notably in the Spectator’s Code Red series. But inequality itself also matters, and the growing gap between rich and poor has created understandable resentment, including the sort that picks up bricks.

And something else has been going on. Hamilton and Toronto used to be separate, physically and psychically. They looked down on us; we raised a finger. Slowly but surely this changed. Hamilton has always been the cheaper place to live. Suburban growth in Ancaster and Flamborough enabled people who worked on the west side of Toronto — from Mississauga through Burlington — to move here, save money, and commute. But in the last decade or so this trend became a thing. Hamilton has become part of what planners now talk about as the GTHA.

This matters because, since the turn of the century, the cost of housing in Toronto has ballooned. Its new skyline proclaims Toronto to be a world city, with a world city’s problems of great poverty and wealth. This has encouraged many more Torontonians to think about Hamilton.

Some commute; others (including those in the arts community that migrated from Queen West to James North) have looked to make a living in the Hammer; still others have stayed put but have invested in rental properties in the Lower City. As a result, costs in Hamilton, although lower than Toronto, have risen in lock-step.

A few weeks ago I overheard a conversation between two women on Locke Street. Each was walking her dog and, apparently, the dogs had introduced them, as dogs do. One woman was explaining which local park was good for letting a dog run free. It turned out that this migrant from the big city was teaching a more recent arrival about the local amenities.

And so that Audi may be owned by a commuter; that upscale store may be patronized by immigrants from Oakville; the landlord who is raising your rent may live in central Etobicoke.

In other words, the gentrification we see in Hamilton is not wholly, or perhaps even primarily, homegrown. It reflects the gentrification of Hamilton. It is this, more than anything, which has pushed up prices and rents, sharpening contrasts between rich and poor, not just in the gentrifying areas but across the whole city.